


Claire in the World

by isthemachinesinging



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-10
Updated: 2013-03-10
Packaged: 2017-12-04 21:53:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/715505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isthemachinesinging/pseuds/isthemachinesinging
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire, in the aftermath of the events of The Rapture, begins to dream, where she finds Castiel. She's determined to bring her father home again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Claire on the Run

Before the beginning of all beginnings, there was a void. She can remember it now, touch it. The angel carved it into her. She remembers the dizziness as she falls, he falls, it falls, and for a moment she is looking out of her father’s eyes, before there is a twisting impact and she gasps, staring down at the face that is no longer him. And they leave—same plan, the man in charge says distractedly, staring at his brother. _Take the car. Just run, anywhere, they’ll be after you, you have to keep moving._ He presses a worn paper into her mother’s hand, numbers scrawled messily on both sides. 

“You can call one of these if you run into trouble. He can help you, set you up with something.”

Her mother stares at it, at the multiplicity of numbers. Different area codes, some of them. “Which one?”

“Any of them”, the man tells her. “If one doesn’t work try another.” 

He pauses. “His name’s Bobby. Tell him Dean told you to call. Or Sam.”

Her mother nods, goes to put the paper in her pocket, then seems to change her mind. She folds it carefully, pulls open her purse, and tucks the paper carefully into her wallet. 

“We’ve got a place to go, I think,” she tells him. “We’ll be fine.”

And like that, they’re gone. She’s alone with Amelia now, and she knows this is her mother, but she still shivers remembering the sting of a slap, her mother’s eyes turned black. The familiar turned monstrous.

“Are you okay?” her mother asks, gripping her shoulders and looking her over as if angelic possession perhaps left a physical mark, some bruise to be salved and healed.

“I don’t remember it,” she lies. She’s not sure why she lies to her mother, but she knows that Amelia wouldn’t want to know, really, what it was like. What it is like for Jimmy, what it will be like for him forever. So she lies, says _it’s fine, it was like I went to sleep._ She doesn’t say _it burned_. They leave the warehouse, and Amelia leads her directly to the car, starting it easily. “I was watching.” Amelia answers the unspoken question. “It wanted me to see everything.” And Amelia looks over at her, and Claire knows that Amelia knows she’s lying about remembering. And Claire also knows she was right—Amelia doesn’t want to know.

They keep moving, like the man said. _It’s an adventure, honey,_ Amelia says one evening as they pore over the increasingly worn map. _Pick a place. Where do you want to go?_ And Claire pretends again, pretends to be interested. Texas. California. Arizona. They’re both lying now. Amelia’s never been adventurous; she’s always been the practical parent. Steady, logical, reliable. Claire wants to tell her, _let’s just go home_ , because she knows that’s what Amelia wants, really: to go back to their house, start again. Sometimes she wants to rip honesty out of her heart, leave it lying bleeding and raw in front of her mother. _Daddy’s burning._ But the lies between them are grown increasingly tangled, and she can’t say. She doesn’t know how to cut them back without cutting her mother apart, so she says nothing. 

They settle in Arizona. Amelia’s gotten a job in a law office; it’s not ideal but it’ll keep them fed and sheltered. Amelia doesn’t tell Claire, but Claire understands that Amelia’s hoping they can stay here. They’re not desert people, but they’re both tired of running. So there’s a little house in a tract of identical little houses with identical green lawns. And there’s a Plan, and boxes of salt kept near the doors and windows, and Claire has her own card with Bobby’s numbers. She takes the card out sometimes, when Amelia’s not looking, and traces her finger over the numbers. She thinks about calling him, just to ask. _Is the angel with you?_

Claire’s just started at the new school when it starts. She and Amelia turn on the TV and watch grimly. Earthquakes. Disasters. Amelia shuts off the TV, stares silently for a long time. 

“Maybe you should stay home tomorrow,” she says finally. Claire laughs, and it sounds angry in her ears. 

“They won’t be coming after us, Mom,” she says. “They’ve got more important stuff to do now.”

Amelia asks what this is, what does she know, how does she know?

_It’s a war,_ Claire thinks, but she just shrugs and shakes her head at her mother. 

“I don’t know.” More lies. But her hand steals into her pocket, and she rubs at the now-worn card. She thinks again of calling the numbers, demanding: The angel, where is it?

Amelia grows restless. She doesn’t sleep in her bed anymore; Claire gets up in the mornings to find her asleep in front of the TV, the latest disaster playing out on the screen. She watches Claire, and Claire knows she wants to ask. Claire starts to avoid her. The card grows so worn that she copies the numbers carefully onto a new one and seals it in plastic. But she never calls.

It’s somewhere in there that the dreams begin. She can’t remember them at first, just knows that she wakes up feeling burnt and hollow. The first time she remembers, she dreams of hunger. And it’s not pleasant anticipation; nor the annoying grumble of a meal missed, but agony with fangs that tear into her belly. In the dream she is shoving red, raw meat into her mouth with both fists, blood drooling over her chin and the beast in her belly devouring every chunk she swallows so though she eats and eats the hunger is never satisfied. She wakes screaming. 

_Daddy’s still alive,_ is all she will tell her mother when Amelia bursts into her bedroom that morning. Amelia doesn’t ask how she knows; she understands it’s part of the pattern of lies that started in that warehouse. And Claire doesn’t know, really, whose experiences she is living: she thinks they must be the angel’s because she wakes feeling as if she had swallowed a sun. It’s his touch on her, his brand, marking her: Vessel. She tries to believe they are her father’s, sent in some way through a shared connection with the angel. Perhaps her father is speaking to her; perhaps the angel is only a conduit. She grips that idea as tightly as the card with Bobby’s numbers. She doesn’t want the angel to speak to her. She doesn’t want any connection at all.

When the dreams start, Claire begins walking. She gets up in the morning before dawn, memories of her dreams still burning, and heads outside. At first she only walks around the neighborhood; after a time, this isn’t enough, so she walks into the heart of the town, walking until the sun inside her dims enough that she feels in control again. As she walks, she clenches Bobby’s card in her hand. Even with the plastic cover, it’s getting worn; the plastic creased and bent until it’s nearly split. Claire comes home from these walks now trembling, sweating, and sneaks into the house while her mother still sleeps. She pulls her mother’s phone from her purse and stares at it, rubbing the card in her hand. But now, when she calls, she won’t ask _is the angel with you?_ She’ll ask: _How do you trap an angel?_ If she can trap it, she will make it let her father go. 

She goes to the window. The sun is beginning to rise; she squints in pain at the searing light red on the horizon. She remembers those minutes in the warehouse with the angel consuming her. _It was like being burned alive,_ she thinks, except you couldn’t die. _Like being suspended in the heart of the sun. Like being in Hell._ She grips the card tighter in her hand, until its hard edges dig into her palm, leaving angry red lines. She doesn’t really need the card anymore; she’s memorized all the numbers, and she traces them softly one after another on the keypad. But she doesn’t call. After a while, she hears Amelia stirring in the living room, and her chance to call passes. She replaces the phone in her mother’s purse, and tells herself tomorrow is the day.

That night, she dreams of the cemetery.


	2. Claire in Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claire finds Castiel in her dreams.

Grass scratches at Claire’s feet and she looks down. This is an empty place, a dead place. No, a place of the dead and forgotten. Weatherworn wooden crosses surround her, sunken into the grassy earth—the driftwood of the dead. As she looks around, she sees a few actual headstones, though the inscriptions are soft and worn. The crosses, though, are disturbingly anonymous. She’s never spent much time in cemeteries, but the nameless wooden crosses fill her with unease. Death has erased everything from the person who lies beneath each marker. There was nothing to memorialize who they were, nor when they lived, or what mattered about their lives. Only a cross to mark where their bones were buried.

There’s something else, too. There’s a stillness between sounds, a scent that she cannot place but is quite sure is not coming through her nose. It touches her brain, at that little knot of matter that stares lizard-eyed out of eyes of every hominid. It is always awake, always watching, and now it twitches and curls, hissing into her conscious mind: Dead lie here. Danger. Where there are dead, it is not safe. Danger. Danger. She shivers, trying to stifle that voice that was not quite a voice, that crackling hiss that seemed to rise like a serpent from the deep sea of her mind-beneath-her-mind.

She turns in a circle. Something has happened here, and recently—or perhaps something is about to happen. There’s a sharp smell in the air, a scent that she definitely smells with her nose. The smell of grass and soil after a summer rain; the scent of ozone after a lightning storm. But the grass under her feet is dry, as dry as the bones buried in the ground. “Take these dry bones and raise an army.” She says, and her voice sounds loud and alien in the stillness. She shivers at the implications of what she’d said. The prophets were weird, no doubt about it. She looks up at the sky. “He did raise them, didn’t he? But not for an army. For fear. To sow confusion and terror. “ She thinks for a moment. “Because it was part of the story. Part of _his_ story.”

She walks a little way along a crushed path—a car has driven through here recently, in haste. At the end of the path she stops, attention caught by the grass, speckled and painted a dark maroon. She reaches out and out and strips a blade between the nails of thumb and forefinger, and the maroon color flakes off in a thick powder. Blood, then. She nods, not surprised. This is my body, and this is my blood, given for you, my brother.

“I’m here for you. I’ll always be here for you.”

She doesn’t realize she’s speaking until the last word has left. The words seem to collect at her feet, a confusion of grief. Hers? Someone else’s? There’s a melancholy here, a deep and awful well of sadness that seems to pull at her bones.

The grief is more than she wants, more than she can take, and she stumbles away from the crimson grass and stretches out on the ground, facedown. The feeling of being pulled down, of being tugged, is very strong here, and she screams. And it isn’t down, not really—she knows somehow that this somehow. Down is the closest approximation her brain can find. She is being pulled other. This is where it happened, she thinks, although exactly what it is she isn’t sure. She presses her face into the dirt, grit clinging to her eyelashes and snuffling into her nose as she breathes. Her hands scrabble at the dirt, pulling clutches of grass, purposelessly at first and then with a fervor. She rips out the grass, and pulls soul up by the fistful, oblivious to the way the sandy soil collects under her nails, pushing them up. The nail of her middle finger rips, and she begins to cry, but she does not stop. She cannot stop. After a while she hears a sound, high and distant, and for a while she thinks of blackbirds, a swift dark cloud descending on the field. Then she realizes that she is screaming again, screaming with such force that her voice is already hoarse and broken: “Where are you? Where are you?” The realization tears something in her, and she leaves off her fervent digging to beat at the soil with dirtied, bloodied hands.

“Give him back to me,” she whispers, and her voice is little more than a harsh growl. “Give him back to me, he’s mine.”

\--

Claire awakes with a gasp, her hands twisted tightly into the sheets. She flexes her fingers and examines her hands cautiously, half expecting them to be streaked with dirt and blood, fingernails torn. But her hands are clean, though aching and sore—no doubt from clenching the sheets. She raises a trembling hand to her face, and is not surprised to feel her face still wet, salty residue caked around her eyes. She coughs, clears her throat, and hums softly to herself. Her voice is clear, so she kept the screaming in her dream—a conclusion reinforced by the quiet of the house.

She leans back against the wall, curling her arms around her knees, and studies the blank white ceiling.

“Castiel. I know you hear me. I _can’t_ ,” she whispers. “We can’t. My mom and I. Because he’s not dead, that’s what’s wrong, he’s not dead, he’s gone and he doesn’t want to be gone. He’s a hostage…He’s a prisoner of war.”

Prisoner of war. She turns those words back over in her mind. Yes, that. The war was over—she’s certain of it, she’s certain that the war ended in that cemetery. But her father still isn’t coming home. He’s not being allowed to come home.

“He has to come home. You’ve got no right to him anymore, he did his duty. He did his duty. So you gotta let him come back to his family. Do you hear me?”

She stares unblinking at the ceiling. No answer comes, but then, she was not expecting one. This is the first time she’s addressed the angel directly, but she knows he’s aware. She’s felt every pulse and beat of his grace; she knows the flare when his name is called, the cord that still binds them as angel and vessel. He might not be listening, but she’s going to talk, even if it’s as hopeless as trying to reason with a supernova.

\--

The sky is stretched above her, purple and empty. Below, under her feet, the ground is a slick mirror. The dark, bruised expanse stretches out endlessly on every side of her; beyond her immediate surroundings she cannot tell the difference between ground and sky, up and down. And the longer she stands still, the less she can tell where one ends and the other begins, even underneath her own feet. She is surrounded by infinity on every side, and isn’t that always the way, but infinity usually has the decency to cloak itself. She remembers a trip to California when she was little, her first visit to the beach. Crouching down under the water and screwing her eyes up tight, not so much to keep the salty water out of them as to keep from seeing the unending water in front of her. Of course, there was an end to it, everyone knew that, but if you opened your eyes all you saw was water, an unending and infinite sea. Before, she’d only been in swimming pools, where your eyes burned if you opened them but you were always surrounded by walls. There was a clear line between this and that, something bumping into your vision to break up that endlessness.

She closes her eyes and begins to walk—there’s nothing here, no fear of stumbling or tripping, so she screws them tightly shut against infinity. If there is no delineation between this and that, between here and there, she will make one inside her head. She slides her feet forward, expecting the glassy ground to be slippery, but to her surprise it is like walking on…well, like walking on nothing. Which doesn’t help with the inability to distinguish between ground and sky, but she starts to move with increasing confidence. She starts to stomp her feet onto the ground as she walks, and it makes her heels ache dully but produces a comforting _thunk thunk_ sound.

She walks for a while, with no sense of time passing, losing herself in the solid tromp of her feet and the dark web in front of her eyes, laced with red. She is beginning to think there is no point to this dream when the darkness behind her eyes begins to lighten, to turn red and then brighten to a painful blue.

_Hello, Claire. You can stop now._

She twists around, trying to find the direction of the voice, although she already knows it’s inside her head. But if he’s speaking to her, then he’s here. She knows that voice. She’s heard it only once, but it’s been burned into her. The shattering harmonics of it, like the music of dust falling into Saturn’s pull.

 _You can open your eyes._ He sounds vaguely, wearily amused. She snaps her eyes open at that, his amusement sparking rage.

“It’s scary. All of this—it doesn’t end—I’m not like you. I’m not—I’m _human!_ We’re _tiny_.”

“You’re bigger than you imagine,” he responds, seeming to take in her rage with acceptance. Perhaps he expected it. Probably he did. His voice is different than the last time she heard it. At first she thinks it is the sadness in it, the weariness, the hope—and then she realizes it is not the tone but the fact that there are emotions there. Before it had been like a star given voice, and now he sounds…he sounds human. She wonders if it is her father’s influence, or if something has happened to him during that apocalyptic war.

“Where is this?”

There is a beat, and then he speaks slowly. “This is the passage between the Cage of Hell and the open universe. A…buffer zone. The emptiness of this…void...acts as a failsafe. You might call it the definition of _nowhere_.” There is a moment’s hesitation, then: “The Cage is where Lucifer is imprisoned. And the Archangel Michael, as well. Now.”

She looks up at him. She can’t make out what it is she sees; at once it’s a blinding light and a dark, deep black welt in the landscape. She sees a humanish form; but then her eyes shift slightly and she sees something like a deer, something like a panther, and something like a hawk. She feels dizzy; it’s as if he cannot settle on a single image, or perhaps her brain simply can’t resolve what is standing (lying? Flying?) in front of her. After a moment she begins to perceive that he is holding something. He is cradling something impossibly small near his core. His core beats with a shifting blue-white light, and it seems as if tendrils of that light are binding that tiny thing to him.

“Rescue mission,” he says, apparently noticing her interest. He sounds defensively proud. At his words, the tiny, shapeless form seems to resolve itself and she sees that it is a human being. Suddenly, she recognizes him – the other man from a year ago. Not the pretty one, the leader, the big one. He had scared her. Her memories of what had happened in that warehouse are jumbled, but she remembers the blood around his mouth--the horror with which everyone regarded him at the end. But he’s no longer big here, or scary—he looks small and hurt and helpless bound against the angel’s form. She reaches out to him unconsciously, feeling suddenly on the verge of tears.

“Sam.” She senses that the angel has shifted his gaze from her to the man he is holding. “I’m taking him home. To his brother.”

“And my father? Your war’s over. He can come home now, too, right?” All her rage, all those desperate months of strange dreams and fantasies of trapping him and forcing him to give her father back, seem to have sharpened her heart into a glass knife, twisting numbly in her chest. Where it cuts, despair and longing ooze out, and she is bleeding sorrow.

“Claire, your father…”

But she doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to know it. “You had no right,” she hisses at him, knowing that isn’t true—didn’t her father grant him the right? Just as she herself had granted him the right? What she really means, perhaps, is _it isn’t fair._

The being in front of her bends forward and to the side, regarding her with one of its faces. Luminous, burning centers glow on either side like eyes. Even in this alien face she thinks she sees a very human feeling, a feeling that she had no sense of from this being in their previous intimacy: compassion.

It sighs, its entire body seeming to ruffle and reform with the movement. It occurs to her that the sigh can only be an expression of emotion—surely this creature has no lungs, no need to breathe. She swallows at the realization; he is changed. Changed completely, he is no longer the cold burning star that she gave herself to in order to save her parents; no longer the duty-bound, emotionless puppetmaster that had stolen her father. Castiel has changed. She is filled with sudden sympathy for this being, this creature of light, which suddenly seems so human.

“Your father asked for this. He knew what he was asking, the second time. You know that. He gave his,” and here the word sounds like life, and it sounds like soul, and it sounds like things that she cannot translate into words except as “Jimmy Novak-ness”, “for you.”

“You didn’t ask me.” Claire struggles to keep her balance; she’s still angry, yes, because it’s still not fair no matter if Castiel has changed, no matter he’s not the same, he’s still the one who walked out wearing her father a year ago. “Don’t I get a choice?”

“You are young.” Castiel shifts to the side, regarding her with another face, this one all sharp angles with a single roiling crimson glow in its center. “You wouldn’t have known what you were giving up. And parents protect their children. Jimmy wanted to protect you.”

“You could have told me! Then I would have known! Just because I’m a kid doesn’t mean I’m stupid, you know!” She glares into the crimson pool in his face. She doesn’t know if it’s an eye, but it’s close enough. “What about my choice? What if I wanted to protect my parents?”

Castiel bends close to her, so close that she could have reached out and touched the hair of the man he is cradling. She shudders and shrinks back, but he does not seem to notice. “A father protects his children.”

And suddenly, she knows. “Yours didn’t. Yours left. He didn’t protect _you_. He didn’t protect _us_.” She pulls back further and spins around, hiding her face from the angel. There is a soft huff from behind her, and then Castiel says quietly,

“Yes, you’re right. But your father didn’t leave you, Claire. He didn’t abandon you. He did this because he wanted you to be safe, you and your mother. Because he loves you.”

Claire shivers, staring out into the purple expanse. She feels as if every part of her is freezing into icy needles, and if she moves or even breathes all those needles will shatter apart, and she will never be able to put herself back together.

“I want to go home. I don’t want to forgive you, I don’t forgive you, all I want is my father back, and if you won’t do that I want to go home.” The words rush out of her at once, and she’s not sure if he could understand her. She’s not sure she understands her. There is a rushing sound behind her, a sudden warmth enveloping her, and the purple desert blinks out as if it had never been.

\--

She awakens leaning against the bedroom door, her face pressed into the cool wood. Apparently this time she had not remained pressed into the bed by the paralysis of sleep, but had mirrored her dream walk in the real world. She wonders if she was stomping on the ground as in the dreamworld, if she had carried out her conversation with Castiel aloud. She holds her breath for a moment, but the house is silent around her. If she made noise, it was not enough to rouse her mother from where she slept in the living room.

She twists around, until she is leaning with her back against the door. Her eyes flick up to the ceiling, but she knows the time for praying to the angel is past. She won’t beg or reason with him again. But she’s tired of the dreams, of being cast and tossed along in the tides of celestial whim, grasping for any glimpse of her father.

No more dreams. No more prayers. The war isn’t over for her, it isn’t over for her father, and she can’t let it be over for Castiel. She breathes in slowly, pressing the palms of her hands together, and reaches in to where she can sense that cord binding her to Castiel. She thinks that if she tries, she can figure out how to let it lead her to him, to use it as a line that reels her in to him, or him to her.

It’s time she started to hunt.

 


End file.
